Random thoughts from a few cantankerous American physicians. All contributors are board certified. Various specialties are represented here. I do not know where this will lead but hope it will at least be an enjoyable read. All of the names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms, the ages have been changed, and in half the cases the gender as well. All photographs are published with patient consent or are digitally altered to preserve anonymity. Trust us, we're doctors.

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Monday, May 21, 2007

My dear friend Bohemian Road Nurse has 'tagged me with a meme'. From her website I gleaned the following...

The rules of the meme are as follows:You simply list eight random facts/habits about yourself. And feel free to write a little bit about those things if you'd like

Tagging me means that ETOTHEIPI and Schrodinger's Cat are tagged as well. This seems likely to produce a lot of crap from them, but, for now, I will simply write my own crap. Here goes...

1. I love college football. Football is the greatest game ever invented by mankind. All of you who disagree are idiots. Cheerleaders are great too but seriously, if you are a dude and you are a cheerleader, then you are at least really weird if not a closet homosexual. I know, I know, you get to travel with all the hot cheerleaders etc... but I still think you have cake in your pocket.

2. On the sexes: Men and women are different. That's the way God made us. All attempts to minimize or ignore this end in wailing, gnashing of teeth, and women's semi-pro football (which we have just down the street- it's terrible) or women's boxing (which is an affront to everything good and holy).

3. On Government: People are all flawed and we all have free will and hence the need for government. Government works best when it maintains a behind the scenes presence and allows for the flowering of human achievement and accomplishment by maintaining order by the rule of law. Government should fashion a safety-net for its citizens but not a safety-couch for anyone who happens to wander or sneak into the country. Right now we have a safety La-Z-Boy reclinerwith wide-screen HDTV for all. The huge bureaucracies responsible for this recliner elevate mediocre people with mediocre ideas to great positions of power. Generally, people are either of the mind that they are the one's that can or should fix their own problems or they are of the mind that it's the government's job. The latter type of people are all chosen by a secret computer to man the many superfluous posts at all government bureaucracies or they are chosen to be on disability. As the 83rd permutation of this rule my hospital is now on double secret probation and may be forced to close because one of the aforementioned flunkies found a patient chart which was corrected improperly. Someone scratched through an entry instead of drawing a single line through it and initialing it.

4. On Guns: I own guns. If you decide to rob my house or do other nasty stuff to me or my family and you succeed in making it past my very large dog then I will shoot you happily, and, if you are still moving, I might shoot you again until you stop moving. Then I'll try really hard to resuscitate you after I walk calmly to the phone to call 911. I'm full service.

5. On My Career: Emergency Medicine is the best possible job for me and the worst possible job for me. As you can see from above I like folks who are "internal locus of control" people, people who take responsibility for themselves and their situations. When I see these folks as patients they are generally very sick and, generally, I can make a big difference for them. When I see the La-Z-Boy crowd, probably 65% of my patients, there's not much I or anyone can do for them. Hence, I am perpetually presented with people who are absolute wastes of carbon (products of our current societal engineering schemes and absent or drugged-out parents) without any insight into their problems who believe I should fix them immediately for free. Believe me, I have many problems and I am far from perfect, but if you call me on it I will listen and try to improve and all that stuff. Anger and pain is therefore a direct and daily result of my job. The other problem regarding Emergency Medicine for me, besides feeling like I'm bailing on the Titanic, is that I do not handle the randomness of my schedule well. I take a sleep medicine most nights, and the sleep disturbance, combined with the La-Z-Boy patients, will probably drive me out of the ED soon. Too bad because I'm good at this job and I don't know what else I would do. It's clearly bad for my health .

6. On Fairness: Life is not fair. Don't expect for it to be. Case in point. I feel like I have reached the pinnacle of a very high mountain doing what I do. I will never be rich from it and will not retire early. Second case in point and less on the self-pity side, lots of nice people die right in front of me and usually from no fault of their own. Car crashes, drive-bys, whatever. Life is not fair. I also believe, however, that there is an afterlife, and I believe it will be more fair than any of us would wish. True justice should scare the crap out of you.

7. On Respect: If there is a group of people less deserving of respect than today's college professors then I don't know who they are. Wait, I've got it! Celebrities! At least the college professors (only a vanishingly small percentage of whom have ever held a job outside academia and a vanishingly smaller percentage of whom have served in the military) have "book learnin.'" Why do people give a rat's ass what Leo DiCaprio thinks about "climate change", or what (or whom) Paris Hilton is doing, or what other glittering jewels of colossal ignorance think about anything? Did they even finish high school? And what is it with the cognoscenti today? Most are educated far beyond their intelligence. The people who carry advanced degrees and have some rudimentary knowledge of history but still believe that just one more trillion dollars spent on education or health care or welfare or whatever the next great fix-it is will do the trick? They carry, just beneath the surface, a belief in their own superiority and the belief that most ordinary folks just can't do it without their help. I hate them. The only people I respect before they earn my respect are people in the military, doctors, and the clergy.

8. On Coca-Cola: There is nothing better after a good sweat than an ice cold coca-cola.

BHR, I have a feeling not much of this is up your alley but thanks for the invite. ETOTHEIPI? 'Cat? The world awaits.

Thank you, 911 Doc! I LOVED your responses!!! (And I can definitely relate to many of your issues.) And since you like cheerleaders, I was once Miss California Cheerleader during my undergraduate years...)

dear BHR, please elaborate on your cheerleading career. i'm almost weak in the knees! when i grew up, about as far away from LA as you can get, I was a USC fan and it was solely due to their cheeleaders. yum. perhaps you might favor us with a picture from your championship season on your blog? i understand if you do not wish to do this but one can hope!

well congratulations monkey-girl, you are the first ever with a comeback to the "bilingual" conversation ender. i usually throw it out there to sow confusion and maybe get a laugh or two and that's all it means (though i really did speak pretty good french at one time... great choice right?).